Bookraft

Ephraim Schwartz raises a searing business ethical question about dealing with repressive regimes in his column which normally centers on IT Policy and Processes. Ephraim raises a number of valid concerns and so I went to Google to see how vigorously the debate on this and other issues in the Business community was being discussed (try it yourself, just enter "business and ethics" - be sure to add the quotes because then the phrase is searched for).

41,900 results seems impressive until you enter "Jessica Simpson" and get 7,295,012 results. And when the entries start repeating themselves or getting lost on tangential issues by roughly entry number 30, you know there may be a lack of ethical focus here. And when Ephraim's specific issue of how do businesses deal with repressive regimes - this issue is nowhere to be found unless you sort of coax it out of Google by entering: "Business and ethics" repressive regimes operating .... well you get my gist.

Now don't be totally alarmed. There is a lot of Busines Ethics window dressing, especially from Business Schools. But remarkably little from the business press - just try the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Business Week, Harvard Business Review, Economist, and Fortune among others. Now don't get me wrong they certainly cover the pecadillos and occasional moral travesty. And they even manage to feature not a few "tightrope walking consistently on the otherside of the ethical line" in those "take what they give you, steal the rest" stories that almostly gushingly admire the chutzpah until some "Yank chain" big enterprise bouncers sets the record straight. Even the Mob knows discipline.

And so Fortune, to counter balance Forbes100 Biggest Billionaires issue, has its annual "Gosh Darn Those Executives Are Rewarding Themselves Ever More Lavishly" story - until it gets really serious as in the case of Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski and cohorts or Hollinger's Conrad Black and colleagues who identify the cash of the corporation as theirs to deal with as if their own. The Economist will have its geewhiz analysis which will conclude who could have connected the dots and predicted that Ken Lay and Enron would bilk several states, banks, and accounting institutions and unleash Sarbanes Oxley on the Business World. And Harvard Business Review will have its bi-annual "Fairness and Ethics Makes Cents" trotter - but please no ongoing discussion. In short Business and Ethics is treated as news and not an ongoing issue of interest to their readers like marketing strategy or harvesting innovation.

But Business and Ethics Has Bite

Let me suggest that Ephraim is onto something. The issues of Business and Ethics are going to keep cropping up as a louder and louder drumbeat and for the following 3 reasons:
1)The world is confronting ever more complex Worldwide Wicked Problems:
a- environmental dysfunction as human consumption and waste taxes ever broader ecosystems on land, sea and air and these ecosystems' abilities to cope. The ecosystems push back with hurricanes, outbreaks of disease from AIDs through asthma to Avian Flu (to just cover the "A's" in diseases), and downstream toxic passbacks which incur huge and unaccounted for clean up costs;
b- The check is due for worldwide free trade. 750 million Chinese and nearly the same number of Indians alone are willing to work for what appears to be in developed countries a pittance but is a huge marginal improvement to them. As businesses relentlessly pursue the lowest possible labor costs - many developed-country economies are going to see economic purchasing power outsourced overseas. Each developed economy because of varying-sized stocks of accumulated wealth( less personal and national debt) will be able to soften the blow but with drastically different efficacy;
c-the moral majority, whether it be in the US Moral Majority , European fundamentalists or Arab al-Qaida ranks, are starting to raise the critical questions - Is Progress our Most Important Product? Can we trust "Liberals" or "advanced Western developed countries to dictate what is progress - be it stem cell research, the right of women to vote, or the right of Israelis to coercively claim ever larger chunks of territory for a homeland after being nearly totally absent for 1800 years from that same homeland. And these moral issues like the right of women to an abortion or the right to bear arms in the US are very nuanced and yet also extremely divisive because they are often couched in moral, religious or ethnic coatings.

2)People are becoming more aware of the Fairness equation. Questions like why should top executives get 100++ times the compensation of the average wage earner in an organization when "success could not have been achieved without the dedicated efforts of our employees".? Or why should top executive compenstion and job loss be riskless with inncreases in compensation even in years when stock prices have declined and a golden parachute of $10s of millions when tey are replaced ? Or why should goverments give grants and tax breaks which disproportionately favor the wealthiest top 10%. The issue is whether developed democracies are even bothering to come close to delivering equal access, equal opportunity and rewards remotely commensurate with contributions. Given 1-b) above, 2) here stays on the front burner.

3)Meanwhile there is a communication revolution following the transportation revolution of the last century taking place. The world is more a village than ever before. With DSL I can comfortably blog, IM, or VOIP with nearly anybody in the world. And with Google, Yahoo, and Skype I have rapidly improving ways of finding who and what I want to talk with and/or find out more about. In short the feedback loops in society are getting shorter and truer. If interested one can find out the underlying nature of things much faster than ever before.

With Information at my Fingertips, I can find out that after being convicted of Antitrust Violations in 1999 and pledging never to do that again, Microsoft is back to the future and now cutting off the oxygen to its BI competitors. Redmond is doing almost an exact duplicate of what it did to Netscape - charging zero for a complete BI Stack, knowing full well its BI competitors have no database which Microsoft has and charges for. Or in the $2Billion of addons to the Transportation Bill not vetoed by Congress nor the President, there is a 200 million pet project .....

In sum, because information is so accessible and becoming even more so - moral issues and business and ethics have less likelihood of hiding under the disguise of "Ignorance is Bliss". As Katrina showed, goverments and business can ill afford the Ignorance Defense.

(c) Ideas In Formation and JBSurveyer 2005